[Please CC me on replies, as I am not subscribed]
Hi debian-installer team,
at the moment, the Debian installer creates a /etc/hosts file containing
the local host name¹, so that this name is resolvable even if not
registered in the DNS. Unfortunately, this is a possible cause of
problems when the user wants to change the hostname – he has to change
it in /etc/hosts two.
Lennart Poetting’s libnss-myhostname² works around this issue. Instead
of hard-coding the hostname in /etc/hosts, this nss module resolves the
current local host to 127.0.1.1. It also works with ipv6.
Would this be something that could be used by default in Debian, maybe
for squeeze+1?
Pros:
* Renaming a host does not affect /etc/hosts.
* /etc/hosts is the same on all installation and can be made a regular
static conffile shipped by some base package, instead of being created
by netcfg during installation.
Cons:
* Another nss module that has to be loaded.
* More code involed in a very common procedure that might contain bugs
(but these will eventually all be fixed, I assume).
What do you think?
Greetings,
Joachim
¹ file /packages/netcfg/netcfg-common.c line 729 func netcfg_write_common()
² http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libnss-myhostname
--
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata

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